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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 141
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 141 |
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A Mr. Ponzi offered
to double his investors' money in a very short time. Behind his promise of
grandiose returns there was no engine of industry to harness human potential
and generate revenue. It was all a facade, using the money of new investors
to pay off the previous ones. Soon the bubble burst, and with that Ponzi's
name was forever etched in contemporary parlance as an eponym for such
schemes. (Then again, who knows... he may have been ahead of his time and
dealing in Internet stocks :-). At any rate, in this week's AWAD we'll invest
our time in eponyms from fact as well as from fiction.
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Joined: May 2000
Posts: 7
stranger
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stranger
Joined: May 2000
Posts: 7 |
One of the most irritating eponyms is mentor; not in itself, but in that the person being mentored always gets referred to as a mentee, which is a *horrible* word. A friend of mine suggested that it should really be a telemecus (sp?), which would be another eponym and make the whole thing work better.
Rach.
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AOL IM: RachelEDugdale
Rach.
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AOL IM: RachelEDugdale
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
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Encyclopedia gives Mentor as tutor of Odysseus' son Telemachus.
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=8598&Search=true&Forum=All_Forums&Words=Mentor&Match=Entire Phrase&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=1year
Allo
You might want to check out this thread. It goes on about this subject also. I didn't do the bracket thing to make it clickable since the url is toooo long and post would then be larger that our screens (quite annoying). You can copy and paste it in the address slot if you want.
Salut
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you can cut the link off after this field ...Patience, tsuwm, patience! We are listening. Really. And I start to feel a formation coming upon on us - YCCTLATN 
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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There are many,many medical eponyms, but thirty years ago there was a call for diseases to be named from causative agent, pathologic process, etc. For a while some journalists were even referring to Lyme's Disease.Actually it is interesting that recognition of the disease began with a bright group of mothers in Lyme, Connecticut.
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Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Whoa! I have just read the article about Anu in an actual Smithsonian magazine that an oh-so-kind friend sent to me. The size of the AWAD distribution makes Gargantuan a VERY appropriate word! 
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2 |
When I lived in Rhode Island, I was told that the fashion of a partial beard on the cheeks was named "Burnsides" from General Burnside, a civil war general from R.I., who may have initiated the fashion. My understanding is, that after a number of years, when he was no longer famous, people who heard the term "corrected" it to sideburns, which made more sense to them (but not to me), and that seems to be the usage today. I checked the dictionary, which does give each as meaning the same fashion. Can anyone confirm my story? Does anyone remember General B.?
Jerry
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Joined: Feb 2001
Posts: 387
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Feb 2001
Posts: 387 |
I heard about AWAD through Smithsonian, Jackie. And that sideburns story is true as far as I can reckon.
jimthedog
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